The Tustin Police Department will be paying about $1.7 million over a 10-year period for a high-tech dispatching and record-management platform with a New York company called Mark43 Inc., which has also installed its system in cities including Seattle and Boston.
Mark43 will provide the department with a fully integrated system including computer-aided dispatch, records management, property and evidence, analytics, and case management.
The Tustin department has almost 100 sworn police officers and 55 civilians, according to its website.
Tustin, OC’s 14th-largest city, counts a population of nearly 80,000.
The department said it conducted a two-year search and evaluation before selecting the cloud-based, public safety software company for the contract.
Lt. Andrew Birozy, professional standards division commander of the Tustin Police Department, said the process included product demonstrations and on-site visits to current Mark43 customers across California.
“Their flexible technology will streamline the way we do our jobs and make for incredibly simple data-sharing across our department,” Birozy told the Business Journal on May 22 by email, prior to the wave of national protests over the killing of George Floyd. Tustin has been the site of peaceful protests.
The Tustin City Council this month unanimously passed a proclamation voicing the city’s solidarity with those who “protest peacefully against injustice, racism and hate.”
$1.7M Cost
Birozy added, “We heard about Mark43’s willingness to listen to customers over and over again, ultimately choosing them for their advanced cloud technology and outstanding customer service.”
The technology will allow officers to spend significantly more time out on the streets by cutting down on hours of report writing and paperwork, according to Mark43. Hosted on Amazon Web Services Government Cloud, Mark43’s platform will enable data-sharing across the entire department.
The Mark43 team has conducted thousands of hours of ride-alongs with police officers and shadowed dispatchers on the job to learn their tech needs firsthand.
Mark43 says the Placentia Police Department has been a customer since 2017, and says the company has 40 clients across California.
“It was a long procurement process,” Matt Polega, Mark43 co-founder and head of marketing, told the Business Journal. “I think over the course of that procurement process, I hope it became clear that Mark43 is very much a partner.”
Polega said that in general the system’s cost can run from the hundreds of thousands of dollars into the millions, depending on the size of the project. Mark43 says it expects the Tustin system to be implemented possibly as early as April of next year. Â
City records from March indicate the city will pay some $1.7 million over the course of the contract for the new system.
Harvard Classmates
Founded by Polega and two Harvard classmates in 2012, Mark43 builds software that is giving police departments in major cities around the country an upgrade.
The company is armed with almost $78 million in funding from investors including General Catalyst, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, the investing arm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The company also provides public safety agencies with software to improve their operations during the pandemic; it notes that agencies “must document COVID-19 exposures and quarantines so command staff can adequately track and strategically deploy the limited number of healthy personnel in their agencies.”
